Marvel-Domination Crossover
by Drgyen
Summary: A merge world of S.M. Stirling's Domination series and the Marvel Universe.
1. The Battle of the Rhine

Author: Created and posted on Counter-factual . com by lukedalton

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**S.H.I.E.L.D. DATABASE: The Battle of the Rhine**

**DATE**: 1 April – 4 April 1944

**LOCATION**: Central Germany

**BACKGROUND**: By early 1944 the leaders of the Pan-European Commonwealth were aware of the intention of the Domination to launch a final offensive. The most dire news, obtained by the infamous Agent of 1000 Faces, was that the nuclear project of the Domination was fully operational, while the European one was stopped by critical material shortage. Conscious of the military situation politicians and generals alike know that their possibilities of stopping the snakes were slim, unless some miracles happen.

The "miracles" was a diplomatic breakthrough between the Allies and the PEC, as the first were wary of stop officially the state of war between the two blocs as the Draka menaced to ally themselves with the Japanese; in a secret meeting, made possible by the trans-dimensional technology of Dr. Bruce Dickson a.k.a. the Thin Man, held in Atlantis between European president Eduard Daladier (with his military aid General Charles DeGaulle and Baron Wolfgang von Strucker) and President F.D. Roosevelt (in the company of scientist Howard Stark and General Chester Phillips), a "gentlemen's agreement" was reached.

The Allies will not sign any "official" peace treaty or truce with the Commonwealth but they will stop any offensive action if the PEC will done the same, so freeing resources needed by either power to continue their war effort against their perceived real enemy. The second miracles was the President Daladier accepting Von Strucker's idea of pardoning all the _ubermensch_ (all tainted by Nazi collaboration) and unite them, plus every other continental super-human willing to fight for them, in a single military unit, for a strike against the incoming Draka offensive. Von Strucker theorized that the super-humans had the capacity of at least slow the snakes' offensive and giving time to regroup and resupply at the regular forces. By then the Blitz Brigade was born.

**PREPARATIONS**: Drakan security about the battle plans was extremely tight and considered the best possible. Unfortunately their inexperience (and utterly dismal and disbelief) with super-human opponents make the effort of obtaining all the information needed really easy for people who can assume any identity or have mind control power. Within days the European General Staff was in possession of the list of objectives, bomber routes and flight plans, and even the order of battle and the meticulous details of the Drakan army to conquer the remaining free European nations. With this information in hand, von Strucker's plan was accelerated and a secret but urgent call for all the super-humans of Europe was made. Promises were made and pardons issued, Baron Zemo, the commander of the Blitz Brigade, guided the scavenging of Hydra's remaining deposits so to recover any possible surviving wonder weapons, with everyone praying that all this effort was enough. DeGaulle ordered a limited and secret evacuation of key personnel and material from the discovered objective, knowing that a mass evacuation or troops redeployment simply had revealed to the Draka that their secret was out.

**INITIAL STAGE**: The Drakan initial plan was a series of night raid by selected units of bomber squadron, employing the newest and most powerful weapon known to man until now; after the initial onslaught the vast Domination army will have launched the massive offensive that had surely bring the damned Europeans under the yoke. By the dawn of 1 April the Draka general staff knew that the plan was now horseshit: communication with the nuclear bombers were lost way before they reached their objectives (later it was discovered that all the aircraft were shot downed by the PECAF who knew their destination, route and time was waiting for them and using some of Hydra's prototype arsenals engaged the enemy formations in a series of fierce but one-sided battles); even worse almost two-third of the scout units don't answered to any call and those remaining were sending absurd reports of being attacked by strange men invulnerable to their weapons and with fantastical powers - the Arch-Strategos never issued any order regarding how to counteract this as the entire military compound was shattered by a series of terrible explosions, as the bombs leaved earlier by saboteurs and mind controlled minions were finally activated, with the result of destroying almost all the Drakan command except some lucky exception, but for the initial hours of the battle the units on the front were on their own.

The slow response to that reports was surely due to the already stated fact that culturally the Domination always mocked and ridiculed the concept of "super being," "masked vigilante" or even "super soldier," thinking of being just a phenomenon and military propaganda for immature damnyankees or crazy-Nazis; on their defense must be noted that until now the presence of Allied and Axis super-humans simply compensated each others, leaving the bulk of the fight to conventional forces so the effective use of military supermen was untested and the prevailing opinion in all the military circles was one of the British Generals, G. Ennis, who steadily proclaimed that "costumed buffoons" are no match for real soldiers and in a real fight they will be slaughtered. Unfortunately for the Domination (and the career of many high ranked military men) this analysis was totally wrong.

Zemo divided his forces in small units with high mobility but with firepower equal to a tank battalion and used them initially to harass and eliminate the recognition unit of the enemy and blunder the Janissary probing attack; after this initial phase the Blitz Brigade begin to corral the Domination forces according to the Von Strucker Plan, using hit and run tactics and limiting the engagement's time so to drawn them all in the chosen point where to fight them with all their forces combined. The place chosen was a plain field near Gottingen, where the enraged Domination forces begin what they thought was the final extermination of the remaining European forces. Unfortunately for them their scouts (or at least what remained of them) failed to recognize that one of the mountains was in reality a camouflaged mobile fortress, one of the hidden projects of Johann Schmidt and Baron Zemo. The combination of the sudden attack and terrible barrage by the gun of the so-called "Murder Mountain", and the fact that the enormous thing simply ignore the Draka fire and literally stomped any resistance broke the Domination line in the first 30 minute of the battle, naturally helped by the valiant efforts of the Blitz Brigade.

The success of the battle was so great and the collapse of the Draka front so total that the Pan-European Command was initially unable to finish the retreating units as many of her forces need to be redeployed; this calm was short lived as General DeGaulle himself gave the order of a full counterattack with the forces available in the moment, as there were no time to waste before the Draka regrouped. In a hurried and hastily created attack what remained of the various European armies attacked the shattered Janissary and Citizen units and "put them out their misery" as commented by Baron Von Strucker. In a stunningly rapid advance much of Northern and Central Europe was freed from the yoke within a week and countless of Draka prisoners were rounded up and sent in the newly open prison camp of Dachau and Buchenwald. Unfortunately for Free Europe the luck was not destined to last. Strategos Von Shrakenberg, even if severely wounded from having lost an arm to the vampire Baron Blood, left the hospital and personally taken command of what remained of the Domination forces and in a series of brilliant and desperate maneuvers and greatly inspired leadership halted the DeGaulle offensive just out of the Warsaw-Prague-Zagreb line which in the end become the official borderline between the two nations.

Things goes very differently in the Spanish Front, as the Draka were forced to use what remained of their atomic arsenal to stop the 2nd Armored Corps from literally throwing them out of Spain; the Draka's desperate effort ended with the frontline basically dividing the Iberian Peninsula in two. Just a day after the Pan-European offensive was halted and all their super-human forces were destroyed, the Domination (after seeing the Japanese Empire humbled in a few days by the Invaders and fearing the USA entering the war at Europe's side) offered a peace treaty which established the actual frontline as the new border. The European leadership accepted immediately knowing that they don't have the resources to survive another offensive.

**ANALYSIS**: The battle was the textbook example of what happen when troops untrained and unequipped for super-humans face them on open field. Janissary and Citizen troops quickly panicked and run when suddenly hit by men and women who can shrug off without consequences anything except direct hit by high calibre guns. Rumors persisted of depleted elite Draka units who shoot their official because they refused to go back on the front. This effect can be compared to the first appearance of the tanks in a battleground, with the infantry, unable to counter it, running en masse, except only this time ten time worse as the effect to see a single woman destroying a tank battalion with her bare hands in less of 10 minutes (happened near Koblenz when Kriegerin Frau faced advanced Draka elements who had thought the zone secure after a massive conventional and chemical artillery barrage) was totally out of anything even remotely dreamed by any Drakan.

Another factor who was against the Draka was the supernatural one; the Domination civilian and military leadership (but even the general population) sternly refused to believe not only any reports regarding super-human, or simple thought that they were greatly exaggerated, but in magic too, as the profound change in the Drakan society during the first post-war period brought a strong wave of atheism and rationalism which totally relegated magic as an irrational superstition, so making them totally defenseless against menaces like vampires (Baron Blood and Bloodscream among the most famous) or wizards and their magical weapons. This weakness was used to infiltrate the Draka command center and obliterate it, successfully killing the majority of the military leaderships (the higher officer surviving the attack was Strategos Erik von Shrakenberg, even if his left arm was severed in the event) just before the beginning of the fight, so to add more confusion and panic at the situation and slowing any possible response.

**CONSEQUENCE**: In the immediate aftermath of the titanic battle, the Domination forces were shattered, their supply lines broken and their command structure in disarray; only the leadership and military prowess of Erik von Shrakenberg saved the surviving military forces from being totally overwhelmed by the Pan-European counterattack. The strategos, even if not totally recovered from Baron Blood's attack, created an hastily formed general command with the remaining officers and created a last line of resistance a dozen of kilometers from the massacre, revoking various probing attack in other sectors and calling back all the unit he contacted, so to reestablish a more linear front and secure a logistic and communication line.

In Archona, the news of the battle created a political climate never happened before, one of panic and defeat, accusation were made and menace proclaimed. Archon Edwina Palme was obliged to resign after a nervous breakdown. The entire military and civilian leaderships of the Domination was gripped by panic when unfounded rumors that another European super-human attack force was headed to Africa began to circulate. Between the growing unrest and uncertainty, the military loss (both in terms of material and prestige) and the possibility that the Allies used this situation for attacking them, the Draka leaders decided to accept the ceasefire that President Daladier offered using Swiss diplomats as middlemen.

With the Battle of the Rhine ended the European part of the Eurasian War, the Domination maintained total control of Southern Europe (Italy, Iberia immediately south of the Von Strucker Line, Greece and the Balkans) but great parts of the continent was free. Politically this event ended the career and the administration of Edwina Palme, who was found dead in his house a couple of days after his removal; the death was ruled a suicide caused by ingestion of rat poison. From a pure military point of view this and the destruction of the Japanese military forces by the combined super-human Allied forces in a short campaign was considered the beginning of the modern super-human warfare; a new type of arms race was begun and the world was never to be the same.

**IN POPULAR CULTURE**: The Battle of the Rhine was one of the most famous and important military events of Europe and by many is considered a Second Thermopylae, so it's natural it was depicted and mentioned in numerous work of art and fiction in every part of the world. The most famous ones are the song "4,000 to 1" by the Swedish power-metal band Sabaton, who was included in their 1996 album _The Art of War_, and the 1978 Anglo-German co-production _The Battle of the Giants_ directed by Stanley Kubrick with Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of Baron Zemo and Malcolm McDowell as Erik von Shrakenberg.

**MEMORIAL**: As recognition for the inhuman effort, great bravery and enormous debt the people of the entire Pan-European Commonwealth had, the Brussels government decided to name every one of the forts that composed the DeGaulle Line for a different fallen member of the Blitz Brigade as former president Daladier said at the inauguration of Fortress Zemo, "So they can still guard and protect us against any would-be-conqueror." In Brussels, right in front other Palace of the European Congress, there is a life-like series of statues that depict the entire Brigade, created by famed American artist Alicia Masters. On the Domination side this battle is hardly remembered, even in the official history, which usually describes it with a few lines and tries to gloss over what is considered the most humiliating and greater defeat of the Race.


	2. New Wakanda

**S.H.I.E.L.D WORLD FACTBOOK: **New Wakanda

**Introduction**: Born out of the ash of the original kingdom of Wakanda, the last African nation to be put under the yoke, the world's newest nation has been founded in 1995, after the infamous "Castle Tarleton massacre" by a group of super-humans led by Peter Parker aka The Spyder (formerly known as Spider-Man) with the aid of the remnants of the local tribes and their "Queen in hide" Shuri. Already two Draka attempts to reconquer the land have failed with tragic and bloody results for any Domination soldier involved and for now the Draka limit herself at contain the possible spread of rebellion, effectively laying siege to New Wakanda but with mixed results. By now assignments on the Wakanda containment zone is considered one of the most dangerous assignments on the entire Draka military. Actually the New Wakandan government has not demonstrated any overt hostility to the AfD, but the Spider-Man public unmasking and the controversial handle of the "Watson Incident" both heavily involved S.H.I.E.L.D. director Tony Stark and Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four, and is publicly known that Parker considered the two former friends responsible for the current situation almost as the Draka, so hostile action can be expected.

**Location**: East Africa

**Climate**: Tropical

**Population**: 2,0000,000 (est.)

**Area**: 12,900 km (est.)

**Export**: Vibranium; High Technology

**Import**: Classified

**Form of government**: Absolute Monarchy

**Head of State**: Peter Parker (King); Shuri Parker (ceremonial queen)

**Capital**: Central Wakanda

**Notable super-humans**: The Wild Pack is the official super-powered branch of the Wakanda armed forces. The team had fought back any Domination attack at the nation from the first day and has developed a heated rivalry with the Draka Magistrate. The group has been deployed worldwide to further Wakanda interest and a recently goodwill tour on the Pan-European Commonwealth and Far Eastern Soviet Republic had start rumors of a secret alliance between these nations. It is considered one of the most powerful and capable team of the world just below the Avengers and the Thunderbolts, even if lack the raw power of many other super-human teams, they greatly compensate with their adaptability, training and teamwork.  
**Threat level**: Alpha

**Composition**:  
Black Panther (Shuri Parker): Field Leader  
Silver Sable (Silver Sablinova): Deputy Leader  
Black Tarantula (Carlos LoMuerto)  
Scarlet Spider (Kaine Parker)  
Spiderwoman (Jessica Drew)  
Aracne (Julia Carpenter)  
Arana (Anya Sofia Corazon)  
Spidergirl (Mattie Franklin)  
Steel Spider (Oliver 'Ollie' Osnick)  
White Gorilla (M'Baku)  
Red Hornet (Hobie Brown)  
Rocket Racer (Robert Farrell)  
Will O'the Wisp (Jackson Advard)  
Sandman (William Baker)  
Morbius – The Living Vampire  
Scorpion II (Flash Thompson)  
Liberty Son (Harry Osborn)

At this roster must be added a contingent of highly trained baseline human troops equipped with high tech weaponry and transports in the role of support.


End file.
